Voters will decide in November who occupies the mayor's office in Olmsted Falls beginning next year.

OLMSTED FALLS, Ohio – When voters cast their ballots in the November election, they’ll have a choice between incumbent Mayor Robert Blomquist and Ann Marie Donegan, a long-time city councilwoman who says she can do a better job of leading the city.

Blomquist has been mayor of this town of about 9,000 since his 1999 election when former mayor Tom Jones retired. Blomquist cites his on-the-job experience, bachelor’s degree in finance from Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, familiarity with other local government leaders, and participation on regional boards, including the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, as among his top qualifications.

Robert Blomquist

A major push of Blomquist’s administration has been installing sewers throughout the city. The work started prior to his election, but the last section of the city should be hooked up to sanitary sewers next year. In 1988, the city was entirely on septic systems.

Blomquist also said he was mayor during an effort to move City Hall into a much larger building. The city refurbished part of a former Olmsted Falls middle school on Bagley Road into the current 14,000-square-foot City Hall.

“When I first became mayor, we were in a former one-room schoolhouse down on Columbia Road,” Blomquist said.

In 2012, with about 160 trains traveling through Olmsted Falls daily on CSX and Norfolk Southern railroad tracks, the city worked with the federal government and the railroads to create quiet zones in the city. By adding additional safety equipment at crossings, such as an embankment between lanes designed to keep drivers from going around activated crossing gates, the city was able to create a zone in which trains no longer sound their horns.

Blomquist said his administration also oversaw relocating the fire station to a more central location to improve response times, and he worked with the state and federal governments for funding of a railroad underpass on Columbia Road at the CSX tracks.

Ann Marie Donegan

Meanwhile, Donegan, who has sat on City Council for 10 years, is launching her third bid for mayor against Blomquist.

“I desire to see Olmsted Falls move in a very different direction, whereby we embrace more transparency in government, more financial responsibility, more community engagement,” Donegan said.

Donegan said one of the changes she would like to see is a greater emphasis on economic development.

“Community and economic development is sorely lacking,” Donegan said. “We have had no commercial, tax-producing development in 13 years. There has been an economic development director and department, but we’ve brought in zero business.”

Blomquist and his economic development director, Rosann Jones, said the city has brought in new businesses, although most are small businesses because of the nature of the town.

The city, working with the Ohio Department of Development, about 10 years ago worked out a tax abatement and tax credit program that helped Evergreen Packaging, a paper company, bringing an additional 40 jobs to its Olmsted Falls plant, which already had more than 150 jobs. The company was known as Blue Ridge Packaging at the time. It is among the top five income tax producers in the city.

The economic development department also provided a list of additional business projects, including about 20 business expansions and new businesses renovating buildings, and the construction of a new Cuyahoga County Public Library branch.

Donegan says the city must do more to attract tax-producing development.

She said she also would like to see more recreational programming in the city and better communication to the public about what recreational programming already exists.

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